If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

He goes on:

The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.

Take that as you may.

SoftwarePatents are granted in the US and the EU. They're not actually currently legal in the EU, but the European council is pushing for unlimited patentability of software. The draft of the legislation has been ratified, but has not been formally accepted.

Current Situation - The Law

In New Zealand the two main criteria for the granting of a patent are:

It is new:
An invention is considered to be new if a description of the invention has not been published in New Zealand before the filing date of the application. No notice is taken of information published outside New Zealand but not publicly available within New Zealand.

It is a "manner of new manufacture":
This has been interpreted by the Courts to exclude such things as "products of nature", mathematical operations, bare principles, mathematical algorithms, schemes or plans and methods of medical treatment of humans.

On the face of it (to a layman), that seems to disallow the granting of patents for an "invention" implemented solely in software.

Current practices/implementation

While the wording above seems to rule out software patents being awarded in New Zealand, there have been a number of patents awarded that could cause concern for software developers and users in New Zealand.

Perhaps the above examples of bad patents are just that... patents that got through because the patent examiner thought "it looked technical enough" or something. Maybe these would be invalidated by a court if contested.

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